The Transformations of the Critical Tradition

Abstract

Before considering how community, human rights, and cosmopolitan ideals can be articulated within a normative philosophical framework, we need to go back to the eighteenth century, take Immanuel Kant’s views on Criticism as point of departure, and show how the tradition he inaugurated has been changed and updated. The focus here is not necessarily on the epistemology of Kant’s three Critiques, but rather on the critical method he initiated and the practical applications of this method in history, ethics, politics, law, and aesthetics. The focus is not solely on Kant either. He is the starting point of a series of definitions of cosmopolitanism, community, human rights, and normativity that still inform Critical Theory. These definitions were important for Georg Friedrich Hegel and his critique of Kantian formalism, but because Hegel remained bound to idealism and to the German status quo, his views had to be superseded. Therefore, it is in the materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that we see a radical rejection of Hegel’s views, which represented an abstract “critique of heavens” that never came down to a “critique of earth.” This subtle but radical change in the meaning of critique becomes explicit when Marx upgrades the critical tradition by proposing a “critique of ideology” and a “critique of philosophy” as conditions for a Critique of Political Economy.